Fanny`s Hits 40 With Timeless Charm Intact

July 25, 1986|By Jay Pridmore.

Twenty years ago, Fanny`s was already a cult restaurant.

In 1967, the famous WAA-MU variety show at Northwestern University put on an extravagant song and dance entitled ``The First Lady of Evanston.`` It was about Fanny Lazzar, owner of Fanny`s World Famous Restaurant, 1601 Simpson St., Evanston.

This week, as Fanny`s celebrates its 40th anniversary, it is still in a class by itself.

Fanny`s recalls simpler days, when restaurants were known for kindliness and good food. Certainly, Fanny`s had that and still does. But today, there is an ironic side to its appeal: Devoid of intentional ``theatrics,`` Fanny`s does more to transport the imagination than many other places that are designed more as stage set than restaurant.

In simpler days, Fanny`s was a place to go for birthdays. It was a place for out-of-town guests. Fanny maintained standards. She kept the food fresh

--she was a self-proclaimed ``enemy of synthetics``--and made sure all the men wore jackets in the main dining room.

All of which is nice, but world-famous? This certainly deserves a look, and for mind-travelers, it is not a wasted trip. The lobby has all the memorabilia and photos of an old roadhouse (with press clippings from around the world). The pine-paneled dining room is as warm and clubby as the 1950s itself.

You might be jaded about restaurants, but you can`t help but be a little amazed about Fanny`s. Blown up big on one wall is an article from a daily paper in Italy, reporting in Italian that the restaurant was given a culinary award in London for its spaghetti sauce, proclaimed to be the best in the world.

Esquire wrote about Fanny`s in 1960.

McCall`s put Fanny`s on some sort of restaurant honor roll in 1948.

A plaque notes that the story of Fanny`s was told on the Voice of America radio all over the world.

It won the Golden Butter Knife Award from the American Dairy Association, among many other awards.

Behind it all is Fanny Lazzar, nee Bachechi. She greets her guests warmly but professionally--she requests reservations, and men who show up without jackets are routed quickly to the cafe upstairs. She banters about her food and her world fame. She insists that hers is one of the only restaurants around that uses all fresh ingredients, has no microwave and never has had a food poisoning case in all her years in the business.

But you don`t have to talk to her long before you see other sides to her. For example, she will utterly amaze you by reciting verse from memory. She was talking recently about aging--she is 80--and she recited a 50-line poem called ``Youth,`` part of which goes:

(It is) a temper of the will,

A quality of the imagination,

A freshness of the deep springs of life . . . .``

She smiles and says that she knows many such poems and that customers request them when she visits their tables.

Amidst all the hubbub of ``world famous,`` it should be noted that the food here is quite good, but it`s not nuova cucina. The menu is limited. There are steaks, chicken and pasta. There are a few fish items. The fried chicken recipe has not changed a bit in four decades.

But the thing that made Fanny ``famous`` is the spaghetti sauce. When she opened her restaurant in 1946, she worked for 10 months, she says, on the recipe, which was ``perfected for taste and digestibility.`` She had a sensitive stomach that reacted badly to pork and to garlic. The recipe she came up with has sirloin, chicken ``and 15 herbs and spices.`` She also developed a salad dressing--she claims to be the first ever to use orange juice in a dressing--that she bottles and sells to stores.

She started in a modest way, but she made no small plans. Her genius, if not in the kitchen, was in marketing. She began writing a ``column`` in the Evanston Review shortly after she opened. This was often personal

reminiscences, other times a bit of philosophy and often simply chitchat about who came in the restaurant in the previous week.

If you read the column (now in the Pioneer papers) and find it a classic in a homey sort of way, you are not the only one. Back in the 1940s, the New Yorker magazine reprinted one of Fanny`s early efforts. The column starts with a lovely few lines about her childhood in Tuscany--``Ah, the fragrance of Italian violets . . . so sweet yet so potent,`` she wrote. The text turns seamlessly to food and ends by suggesting that her fried chicken is ``fit for the gods.`` Always on the lookout for friendly irony, the New Yorker editors entitled it ``The Anticlimax Department: Fried Chicken and Violets Division.`` This kind of early publicity, and of course her sauce, brought many customers from the North Shore and Chicago, despite the fact that she was located on ``the other side of the tracks.`` Business flourished, and she became well-known. She married Ray Lazzar, former headwaiter of the Pump Room. He was a friendly and handsome man who helped Fanny realize the dream that her Italian father had planted.